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I am not an HR person, but having reviewed some LinkedIn profiles of my classmates and other friends, I have some ideas on how to make your LinkedIn profile attractive.

Some quick tips:

Have a descriptive profile: You are more than a list of your job titles. Make sure that you discuss what you do, and what you bring to the table. Be sure to include a short summary statement at the start, and follow it up with details for each of the job-positions. If you have worked for non-brand companies, also include a one line description of what your company does.

Put a good profile picture: Whether you are on LinkedIn, Twitter or match.com, people like to connect to faces. Get a good profile picture. Investing in getting a professional headshot may not be a bad idea.

Get recommendations: Discussing your achievements and abilities is good, but having another person vouching for you adds an additional level of authenticity. It also makes your profile "complete" (Minimum 3 recommendation are needed to make your profile complete by LinkedIn definition)

List your online presence: Your profile would be twice as interesting, if you include links to other relevant websites that you have contributed to. This may be a link to your blog, Quora profile, GitHub page or anything else.

Include your contact details: Not every recruiter has a paid account. Make the job easy for potential recruiter by either being part of the Openlink network (you will need to have a paid account for this), or including your contact details in your profile.

Describe your work: A good number of LinkedIn profiles are no more than a listing of job-titles and educational degrees. Make sure that yours is not one of them.As discussed above, your job-title may mean different things in different organizations, and outside your company, people may have no clue on what you are working on. Explain in simple terms what you are doing currently and what you have done in your previous jobs, staying away from company-specific jargon. Be as specific as you can, and focus more on skills that are transferable and applicable outside your current company.

Get recommendations: You may not be Steve Burda (nor is so many recommendations a good idea for most of us), but if have done any good work in past, there must be some people willing to vouch for it. Ask them to write a short recommendation for you. Best time for asking a recommendation is right after you complete a project. From my experience, I know that people certainly remember your good work for a long time, but with time, they tend to forget the specifics, and generic recommendations are not as powerful!

Choose right keywords and skills: Most above tips would be useful when they are looking for you, i.e. the tips focus on how your profile looks when they land on your profile page. This one is about getting featured in search results, when they are not looking specifically for you, but for people like you, i.e. people having specific skills and experience. Since by default, LinkedIn sorts search results by relevance, it is important to ensure that your profile is keyword-rich. These keywords may be a part of your Profile-summary, Specialties, work experience description, or other details. Also, ensure that Skills & Expertise section features has the right skills listed. LinkedIn allows you to add up to 50 skills. If it is not obvious which skills and keywords you should include, there are two good sources for this. Check out profiles of other people in your domain (or people in your target role). What skills and keywords do their profiles include, and are there any, which actually are your skills too? If yes, you now have some keywords to add to your profile. Another source is especially relevant if you are looking for a job-change. Check out the description of your target jobs, and see what recruiters are looking for. If you do meet those requirements, make sure that right keywords representing these are included in your profile.
One final word on caution here: Write your LinkedIn profile primarily for human readers (i.e. not for bots), and don’t overload it with keywords.

List your online presence: Do you have an active blog ? Are you considered the Subject-Matter Expert on some topics (preferably related to your job-field) on Quora? Do you participate in the Analytics contests on Kaggle or programming projects at Github? If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, make sure to list these and other relevant portions of your digital footprint under Websites section on your profile.
One thing I have seen is that the default website-labels (“Blog”, “Company Website”, etc) are not attention-grabbing. Customize it to make it more eye-catching and informative. One thing that I observed in Google Analytics for this blog is that the traffic from LinkedIn has certainly increased (though not very significantly) since I changed the label for my website to “Amitbhatnagar.com” from default “Personal Website”. Similarly, something like “My analytics projects on Kaggle” or “My answers on Quora” will certainly get some attention, and give your profile an additional dimension.

Groups: LinkedIn allows you to join up to 50 groups. Joining Groups is a great way to connect to new people and to share/seek knowledge/information. Alumni groups and groups related to your current and past employers are obvious choices, but what would really expand your network in a meaningful is joining interests and skills related groups. Examples of these can be: Product Management, Social Media marketing, etc. Another useful aspect of joining groups is that many members allow other group members to send them messages, and as such, you may be able to contact people outside your immediate network directly without having to upgrade to Premium membership.

Bonus tip : Control your Activity Broadcasts: You can control whether your LinkedIn activity (Profile changes, recommendations, etc) gets shown in their connections news feed. If you haven’t followed Tip 0 (Keeping your LinkedIn profile current) and you suddenly start making massive changes to your profile, your co-workers may know that you are planning to quit, and you may not be comfortable with this. To avoid this, go to Settings -> Privacy Controls -> Turn on/off your activity broadcasts, and un-check the box for Activity Broadcasts (Default is checked)

Which ones of these were missing from your LinkedIn profile? Are there any that you disagree with? (Tip #4 is my best guess for this!) Are there any other tips that you feel are missing? Please share them as comments below.

There are two things that I am very passionate about: counseling peers and juniors about higher education/career-planning (I am still in very early stage of my career, but I try to make myself useful wherever I can!) and the power of social media. One place where these two merge is when somebody asks me to review their LinkedIn profile (and this has happened too often in last three years!). Last week, when I helped a close friend with his LinkedIn profile overhaul, I thought it’s perhaps time to get ready a blog-post on things that I usually include in my LinkedIn profile feedback.

These tips are just meant to take your LinkedIn profile from just being present on LinkedIn to having a credible LinkedIn presence. Once you attain this level, you may move to relatively advanced steps, like participating in LinkedIn Q&A, using LinkedIn apps, getting a premium account, etc.

So here are 10 tips not in any particular order, starting with an elementary tip 0.

Tip 0: Keep your profile current, Always: This should be an obvious one, but many, many people ignore it, till they actually have to start hunting for a new job. In today’s connected world, you are always being looked up on LinkedIn. By coworkers, supervisors, recruiters, clients and everybody else!! (Don’t believe me? Start checking “Who’s Viewed Your Profile?” regularly!) And if you haven’t kept your profile updated and are already in job-hunt mode, you may be interested in the Bonus tip at the end of the 10 tips below.

Get a profile picture: Try a quick experiment. Search for your favorite keyword on LinkedIn, and browse through any 2-3 profile out of 10 results on results page. Now, observe which profiles were featured at the top, and which profiles did you instinctively chose to click through. Chances are high that the top profiles were mostly profiles with photos, and if you are like most people, you must have clicked at the profiles with photos and skipped the profiles with no profile picture.
This is exactly what many recruiters will do, when your profile shows up in the results, but has no photo. (BTW, since click-through rate is one of the criteria of sorting results, this may cause your profile to appear even lower in subsequent searches!)
What kind of photos? A professional headshot works best, but this may depend on your target/current industry and function area. For example, for an investment banker or a lawyer, a professional look may be a necessity, but if you are targeting a Silicon valley startup, a less formal pic may work. Of course, avoid party pics or group photos. Use your best judgement, and pick a photo that you are comfortable showing to your manager/recruiter/client.

Get a meaningful “Professional headline”: Other than your profile page, you may appear on different pages on LinkedIn: Search results, groups, Q&A, “People you may know” section for other users etc. At most places, the only things that users will see besides your name are: Your profile pic and “Professional Headline”. So make sure these are good. For most people, the headline is same as their current job-title, which may be okay sometimes. But I believe you are much more than your current job position. Also, many job-titles may hold little meaning outside their organization, and unless your profile visitor knows about your employer, the headline may not convey the right message. For example: a generic title like “Manager at XYZ Corp” tells me nothing, unless I know what managers at XYZ Corp typically do. Something like “Marketing professional with 8+ years of high-tech industry experience” is much better and informative.
And if you are really feeling adventurous and want to make your headline even more attention-grabbing, try something like this:
★ Experienced Search Engine Marketing Consultant ★ Guaranteed ROI ★ Discover Why Companies Hire Me!
I know that not many would be comfortable putting a bold claim like this in their headline. But a headline like this almost guarantees a click-through once you show up in search results. And don’t we want searchers to at least visit our profile, where rest of the details are there!

Grab your Vanity URL: Sign in to LinkedIn and Go to home -> Profile -> View Profile. What URL you see as your “Public Profile” ? Does this follow the default (ugly) format, and look something like this: www.linkedin.com/pub/firstname-middlename-lastname/8/472/f31? If yes, then, it’s time to get a prettier URL for your public-profile.
Try getting one of these formats: firstname-lastname, lastname-firstname, first-initial-lastname or firstname-last-initial. If you have a common name like mine, you may have to use numbers too. (Mine is: http://www.linkedin.com/in/amitbhatnagar1) But this is still much prettier than the default URL. Once you have grabbed your URL, consider using it in the signature for your non-work email, or you may even use it in your resume, if you are looking for a job.

Give your voice to your profile: Most resumes do not use pronouns: bullets are usually led by Action-verbs (“Led a team”, “Conducted a survey.. “, etc.) While writing your LinkedIn profile-summary (and the rest of your profile), consider making your LinkedIn profile distinct from your resume by writing in first person. I personally feel that writing in first person is direct and conversational, and hence, more inline with the style of social media. (I switched to a combination of first person + resume-style 5-6 months ago, and certainly, like it more that way!)
If you are not very comfortable writing in first person or find it a bit boastful, you may stick to resume-style. One style that I am not a fan of is writing in third person. I found profiles written in third person a bit too distant and having an air of fake modesty: You are still boasting about yourself (which is not really wrong if you are honest), but your writing style pretends that what you write is others’ opinion about you!! If you feel that description of your work and abilities would seem more credible in third person, leave that part to your recommenders!

Describe your company/group: For each of your job-positions, consider setting the context for your work by starting with a brief description of the company or the group that you are/working for. If your company is a lesser known entity, this is a must-do! For example: during my MBA, I had an amazing marketing strategy internship with Manheim Auctions, which is the world’s biggest B2B auto-auction company, but since they are into B2B auctions, not many end consumers know about them. I make sure that my profile visitors know the magnitude of the company by including a couple of lines describing Manheim. For my current job, although everyone knows Deloitte Consulting, but not many may specifically know about Deloitte Digital, the service line that I am working with. Again, I include a brief summary of what Deloitte Digital is about before I discuss what I am doing at Deloitte.

Since I know that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Garrett Hoffman is on Quora (I have read some answers by him), my first guess was that perhaps he may be the oldest LinkedIn member here. But when I checked his LinkedIn profile, i found that his ID is 1213, not #1 or #2.

So even before we know who is the oldest LinkedIn member on Quora, we need to know who were the first LinkedIn users, and then, we could check which of them are present on Quora.

A check for LinkedIn ID #1 or #2 leads to a page like the screenshot below. Most probably, these are all dummy users that were created while the initial tests were being conducted for LinkedIn as a service:

Of course, I could not have manually checked all the profile IDs till 1213 (i.e. Reid Hoffman's ID). So I used excel to fetch page title for LinkedIn profiles of first 1250 LinkedIn IDs. You may see that for a non-existent profile (like the one in screenshot above) the page title is "Profile|LinkedIn", and for real users with public profiles, the page title is in format of "<User Name>|LinkedIn" (Example: "Amit Bhatnagar|LinkedIn")

So, after my spreadsheet fetched me this list, it was just a matter of seeing first profile IDs with real names instead of "Profile|LinkedIn" Results can be seen in the screenshot below:

So, first 1209 users are all dummy users, and as expected, the first real LinkedIn users are all from founding team. First three are: Jean-Luc Vaillant, Eric Ly and Lee Hower. And as you can guess from the tags, I could not locate Jean-Luc Vaillant on Quora. So the answer to your question is: Eric Ly

You can consider doing a search by location, but here is an old, neat trick to know the approximate number of people in any geographic area/profession: Use "Advertise with LinkedIn" and proceed with geographic segmentation.

I tried this out, and the result comes out to be a little over 2.5 MM. (See screenshot below)

If you reach this screen, scroll down to select job titles and then, start selecting different job functions. You will see the numbers for each job function. Some prominent functions:

Consulting: 77.5K

Marketing 77.8 K

Legal 49.6 K

Finance 85K

Engineering 209 K (Is anyone surprised?)

Entrepreneurship 217.6 K (For this one, even I am surprised, but perhaps, only in Bay Area, Entrepreneurship can be a leading job function!!)

I would consider accepting the request, and there is one very important reason for that: LinkedIn is not just about your first level connections, it's about the power of your network. And in my opinion, it's your second level connections that actually drive this network.

It's not just about who you know, it's also about who your contacts know. To make this clearer, ask yourself the following questions:

If the recruiter for your dream-job or the perfect candidate for the job that you are hiring for is a second level connection through this "ghost", would you consider reaching out to him?

You had a common social circle. If a good old friend from that circle discovers you through this person, would you consider connecting with the "ghost" worth it?

Thinking from the reverse side: If some time later this person is looking for a job and you are in a position to help (either directly or by making a connection), would you consider helping him out?

If your answer to these questions is "Yes", then do consider connecting. If things are really bad between two of you, then, by all means, ignore the invite. But the fact that you posted this question here instead of directly ignoring the invite, indicates that things may not be that bad.